Politics and Monkeys

Theatre Gigante Revives Mark Anderson’s ‘Quorum’

The circumstances by which seven
strangers arrive separately at what looks like a meeting room are irrelevant in
Mark Anderson’s comedy Quorum. What
matters is the developing group dynamic. There’s no agenda other than to
organize. The question of the organization’s purpose can wait until leadership
is established and methods for decision-making are in place. When human beings
of any bent are sharing space, rules and a power structure, it seems, are
essential.

Anderson wrote Quorum for Theatre X, the experimental theater collective of which
I was a member. I recall the show with great affection. It was Anderson’s sixth
collaboration with our company. He directed the 1993 premiere at our
performance space, now the Studio Theatre of the Broadway Theatre Center. I
played Sammy, a mild-mannered fellow of few words who made his presence felt
through facial expressions and gestures. It was heaven to play—intuitive,
offbeat, performer/playwright Anderson at his best.

Anderson will play Sammy himself in
Theatre Gigante’s revival of Quorum
at Plymouth Church. Isabelle Kralj, his co-artistic director in Theatre
Gigante, will play the voluble Vivian who sees herself as the obvious choice
for group president. Leslie Fitzwater, Ron Scot Fry, Bo Johnson, Jocelyn
Ridgely and Michael Stebbins are the excellent actors who’ll embody the rest of
this embryonic society, folks at once ordinary and mysterious, variably
cooperative and obstructionist, always vulnerable.

Anderson began the writing in the midst
of the ’92 presidential election in which Bill Clinton bested Bush Sr. Inspired
by a television documentary on the social behavior of monkeys, he haunted the
zoo’s Monkey Island observing the creatures’ interactions. He read Robert’s
Rules of Order and pictured the Theatre X actors in monkey relationships trying
to follow the rules.

“It was a playground in my head,” he
told me. “I was just thinking about what people are capable or incapable of in
terms of cooperating. We did a reading at Grinnell College and one of the
faculty members told me I’d deconstructed evolution.”

Why revive it now? “We’re so pained by
the current political situation,” Kralj said. “So to revisit the seeds of human
political behavior from a cosmic perspective is something we need right now and
we thought maybe an audience could use that, too.”